I’d felt tired then. Even in our bed at night, there was work to be done. Emotions to either feel or sweep under the rug. Talking. Thinking. Negotiating. Fucking. And loving. That was the hardest thing. The most exhausting.
I was drawn to Mitch from the first time I saw him when I was still in grad school. He was on the construction crew building a new wing to the science building. It was physical. Chemical. Not just the way he looked, but the way he moved and carried himself. I walked past the site every morning and every afternoon. I watched him from the window in the lounge on the fifth floor. Months passed with this man in my thoughts, the possibility of who he might be and what it might feel like to be in his arms easing the unrest that was always stirring.
Mitch is an intelligent man, but I was surrounded by intelligent men in my classes. The attraction grew more from his physical presence and the calm that lived inside him and soothed everyone he folded into his life. His smile, his walk, the gentle touch of his hands, and the kindness of his words, which I came to know after a carefully planned “accidental” meeting. The crew took their lunch break whenever the food trucks arrived. It wasn’t hard to be walking by one day, catch his eye, drop my bag. I knew he would get out of the line to help me gather my things. Maybe it was an absurdly banal scene from a formulaicrom-com, but it wasn’t beneath me. I’d been desperate to meet him.
There is a look that passes between people destined to become lovers. It is indescribable. Raw, primal attraction in my case, fueled by many nights of intimate imaginings. I sometimes wonder if I was the sole cause of this look that passed between us and the conversation that followed and Mitch’s request for my number. The date that came next and the ones after that and the first kiss, which was a runaway train and didn’t end until we fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
He became home to me. The place where I could lay down my sword and shield and close my eyes, knowing I was safe. That didn’t just disappear when he found solace with another woman. Something that integral to living, surviving, doesn’t leave so easily. Yet the struggle between the places of the mind and body where love resides was brutal.
I feel tired now as I open my eyes and sit up. Sunlight pours in through the window, rousing conscious thought.
What comes at me first are moments from the night before. Walking from Rowan’s car to the house. Leaning against Mitch for support. The girls racing into my arms. They’d been told only what was needed. What was appropriate. The department shrink, Dr. Landyn, had talked Mitch through it on the phone.
Shower, change. Sit with the family for dinner. Rowan stayed for a bit, comforting Mitch more than me. Telling him everything they knew. There was a dark energy in the house. The relief that I left Nichols in one piece didn’t last long. What came quickly on its heels was the knowledge that I had been in danger and a sense of foreboding about what it had done to me. Even Fran had been wary, watching me with caution to see who I was now.
I took one of the pills the hospital prescribed and chased it with a glass of wine until my brain shut down and my eyes closed. I had been settled in my bed, tucked beneath the covers. Mitch curled up behind me, telling me the things he was supposed to. That I was safe now. That it will be better in the morning, in the light of day. But some things should be left in the dark.
I feel a heavy breath in my chest. In and out, as though preparing me for these things that are also beginning to wake and swim to the surface. They’re coming now, and they want to be seen.
They arrive like bursts of vibrant colors, exploding in my mind, bringing a wave of nausea.
A young man dead, lying on the ground twelve feet away. Blood pooling in a halo around his head. Then movement from the racks of clothing as the people who’d been hiding inside them slowly emerge. It was surreal at the time, how the clothing seemed to be coming alive. A pair of jeans. A bathrobe. A dress shirt. Some ran, screaming. Others stood, frozen, hand to mouth, eyes wide. Staring at the man and at me, also frozen, the gun still clutched in both hands.
A television hung on the wall outside the dressing room. Whatever had been on before had been interrupted by news coverage of the scene outside, the scene I could hear in the distance.
I don’t know how long I watched it. Customers running from the store. Police, firefighters, paramedics scrambling to corral them before they could leave. A team was assembled and ready, and I wondered if any of them knew what I’d done.
Then Rowan’s voice in my ear, calling my name.“Elise!”
“He’s dead,” I whispered back. “The shooter’s dead.”
The sickness in my gut grows as I struggle to recall each moment. There is no internal rule book for the behavior that follows in the aftermath of a trauma. Reason and common sense are the first things to disappear as the stages begin to cycle. I taught this in one of my classes. It’s important to our work in law enforcement. Understanding what’s happening inside the mind of a suspect or a witness, especially the victim, helps us get to the truth, even years later when a case remains unsolved. The first stage is shock and disbelief. Then confusion.
I went to the body and checked for a pulse. I held my hand to his neck long after I knew he was gone. Rowan said he heard me scream then—“Come on! Come on!”—as if I could will him back to life and spare myself what was sure to follow and what now pulses through me. A witness said that I laid my jacket over the body, covering his face. Another said that I bent down at his feet and straightened one of his legs that had twisted beneath him when he fell. I don’t recall either of these things.
I picked up the semiautomatic weapon that lay beside the man. It had been altered in a way I didn’t recognize so I didn’t try to disarm it.
It was right then, in that moment, that the tall man began to consume my thoughts—as he does now, in the aftermath. I knew, even with the shock and disbelief, and the confusion that was setting in, that I had to find him—the last person in the line of fire before I killed the man who lay at my feet.
I walked into the dressing room like a zombie, someone said. Holding two guns. In a daze, a trance, another described. What I recall now is the ceiling lined with panels of fluorescent lights. The mustard yellow paint on the walls. The white doors swung open on their hinges. Clothing hung from hooks on the outside and littered the floor. A large rack leaned against the back wall, overloaded with items that had been tried on and rejected. I heard whimpering from behind the one door that remained closed—the last door at the end of the long, narrow room.
I took a step toward it but felt a hand on my shoulder, spinning me around, then a second hand, strong and firm. One of them moved to my face, pulling it upward until my eyes followed.
“Elise!” It was Rowan.
I did not fall into his arms. I did not rattle off the series of events that had just occurred. My mind was on the task at hand, the one closed door.
“There’s a man,” I told him. “He came in here.”
Rowan took both guns from my hands and dislodged the ammunition cartridges. He asked me if I was hit because I was covered in blood from the shooter. He tried to reason with me to come outside. This man could wait. He was safe now, somewhere in the dressing room, and Rowan promised to go back and find him as soon as he took care of me.
The first responders reached us. Units came from miles away to assist, and I was handed off to a female officer I didn’t recognize.
I knew the protocol. That part was clear in my mind. First, a medical check at the hospital. Then a meeting with a union rep. Then an interview at the station. They would draw blood, check for drugs and alcohol, anything that might have impaired my judgment. I’m a cop, and I’d killed a civilian.
The tall man is before me now as I sit up on the sofa. I can see him standing in the men’s department, hands above his head. Trembling, pleading for his life. And then the move toward the dressing room. I search for the missing piece of the memory—the one I couldn’t find yesterday and the one that haunts me this morning.
Was he still in the open when I fired? Or had he cleared the doorway to safety?
